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Tricks of the Trade Show |
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Looking to attract quality prospects to your trade show booth? Don't just hand out logoed pens without asking any questions. Take a strategic approach to promotional product giveaways. Here's how.
Go to a trade show. Any trade show. And this is what you'll see: trade show bags and T-shirts, keychains and pens, mugs and pins. Don't forget beer-can insulators and flash drives, refrigerator magnets and sports bottles, visors and totes. And promotional stress balls. And sunglass clips.
Did we mention mousepads?
Unfortunately, this is what you'll also see at trade shows: hordes of attendees with glints in their eyes, shoveling your carefully considered promotional products into very large bags. Often overlooked in the stampede is the marketing rationale behind those items, the most efficient use of the products and appropriate follow-up.
"There is no doubt there is a flagrant, almost lazy use of promotional products at trade shows," says Ruth Stevens, president of marketing consultancy eMarketing Strategy, in New York City, and a professor of marketing at Columbia University. "The reason is, products - when used in the wrong way - tend to attract the wrong person. Everything we do at trade shows should be focused on qualifying attendees, and having conversations with people we hope will eventually do business with us."
The tried and true use of promotional products at trade shows is, without a doubt, boosting traffic to one's booth. In addition to offering eye-catching objects as lures, gifts also are integral to booth-located games, where, for example, spinning a wheel to win a prize is an interactive way to attract visitors and reinforce a brand message.
"In this situation, winners would receive the high-end gift - perhaps a flash drive, or even one of the less expensive iPods presented each and every hour - and the losers would get a low-end memento," says David Rollé, a Los Angeles-based sales representative for LogoWear Direct, based in Worthington, OH.
Make sure, experts caution, to dovetail the promotional product with the marketing message as much as possible. So, if your product is fabric softener, a possible prize might be a plush toy. The promotional item doesn't necessarily have to be something connected to the product you're selling, but if at all possible it should be tied to the marketing message you're communicating.
Experts stress that products should be useful so that recipients are more apt to hang on to the items and view the logo and marketing message on it as often as possible. "That way, it's constant advertising," notes Rollé. He adds that for best results, the product should be something other people can see, perhaps on one's desk, in a car or being worn, to enhance the image-boosting quality of the gift.
Products given out at trade shows often have long-term impact after the event is over. A 2004 study by Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia, revealed that 72% of trade show attendees remembered the company that gave them a promotional product, and 76% retained a favorable impression of that company. The study also showed that sending out invitations packaged with a preshow gift is statistically a better traffic draw than sending an invitation alone. And an invitation that also offers a gift at the booth draws best of all.
"Certainly, promotional products add value to the event," says Jeff Stanley, executive director of Exhibit Surveys Inc., a Red Bank, NJ, research firm providing market intelligence for the exposition and events marketing industry. But he notes that creativity - that something extra that separates one company from another - is key. "We just had an event last week that was a promotion for Sprint. They were giving away what looked like cell phones, intended to draw traffic, but there were mints inside. It was very clever."
Clever gifts tend not only to draw traffic, but also to be keepers. For a reception on the show floor at this year's annual International Convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), last April in Chicago, one exhibitor supplied drink containers that looked like medical beakers. The faux beakers were, of course, logoed, and invited attendees to the sponsor's booth.
And for the tire-kickers and curiosity seekers who have no desire to do business with you? Promotional products have a role here, too.
"One of the secrets to success at a trade show is to be able to disengage easily from someone who will never do business with you," says marketing consultant Stevens, author of the book, Trade Show & Event Marketing: Plan, Promote & Profit. "You have only so much time to use, and you want to use it effectively." Thus, keep a slew of cheap promotional products behind the booth, she suggests, to hand out to the non-prospects as a gracious way to say good-bye ... quickly.
Some experts advise always keeping the promotional products hidden. Thus, the cheaper product can be retrieved as a disengagement technique, while the upscale, impressive gift can be proffered following a productive conversation with a senior-level decision-maker.
A More Strategic Approach
While booth traffic is helped by the offer of promotional products, the quality of that traffic often trumps quantity, experts say. "I'm uninterested in traffic; I want only quality in my booth," asserts Steve Miller, CEO of The Adventure, a strategic marketing consultancy in Seattle. "I work hard to make people stay away who don't fit our target market."
Miller notes there are exceptions; at a small, extremely vertical expo, for example, where virtually all attendees are prospective customers, then traffic, and lots of it, is good. But at a huge international show drawing tens of thousands? Nobody has tens of thousands of prospects, he says.
"When I'm creating strategy with a client, we first define our target market," says Miller, author of the newly published book, Stop Wasting Your Time at Trade Shows and Start Making Money. He adds that the targeted group of attendees could be a few dozen, or up to 400 at a bigger show ... but hardly ever more than that, because generally there are just not enough booth staffers or show hours to engage with more. "You do want to pull out all the stops to get these, and in that case you'll want an incentive that has value to them."
One of Miller's early clients was Emerson Electric, the big St. Louis-based technology and engineering company. Exhibiting at one show, Emerson targeted only 50 prospective attendees, but was creative in gaining one-on-one appointments with them. In a series of preshow mailings, Emerson mailed three separate parts of a popular golf putter to each targeted attendee - first the head, then the shaft and finally the grip - noting in the enclosed invitation that coming to the Emerson booth could "put it all together for you."
Needless to say, the invitees who came to the booth received complete, greatly coveted putters. The whole campaign - 50 deconstructed putters, 50 whole putters, promotions and mailing, etc. - cost Emerson $25,000, or $500 per targeted prospect, an eye-opening sum considering the usual type of trade show giveaway, but "more than justified given the results," Miller says.
Here's another example of tying a gift into a marketing theme, according to Carl Gerlach, director of marketing for Gill Studios, a manufacturer of promotional products in Shawnee Mission, KS. "If you're giving away an MP3 player each hour as part of a game, send along with the invitation a CD filled with the music that will be loaded on the MP3 player," he suggests. The CD already is a traffic-boosting gift, while the possibility of winning an MP3 player drives even more excitement.
In cases where exhibitors have their prospects well identified, Miller suggests promotional products to lure them to the booth, thank-you gifts after the conversation, another gift if they come back to the booth later (he suggests using coffee or other forms of refreshment as a lure to get them back), and even the offer of free shipping to relieve the attendee of having to lug it all around.
Setting Your Goals
Experts point out the necessity of establishing goals in advance of a trade show specifying what exhibitors hope to accomplish, which can vary greatly. Possible trade show purposes could range from writing orders and generating quality leads to building a database and introducing a new product. Each can be helped along, however, with carefully chosen promotional products, used both as a draw and as a thank-you.
"Smart marketers are using promotional products based on the level of engagement they can get with the visitors," says Paul Kiewiet, vice president of Incentive Marketing Inc., a promotions consultancy and products supplier based in Alpharetta, GA. "It really needs to start with a preshow approach, with objectives and strategy laid out in advance.
Like Miller, Kiewiet recommends that exhibitors make use of the list of attendees compiled by the trade show organizer to winnow their lists down to only the best prospects. "I've known people to send out the front panel of a Swiss Army Knife package to this selected list, with the offer to bring it to the booth for the real thing," he says. "Compared with the cost of a sales call, using this level of product to get a key person to come by your booth and engage in conversation becomes cost-effective."
Kiewiet, for one, likes food as a promotional item at trade shows. Even though not generally long-lasting, edible treats appeal to all the five senses, and thus are memorable, he says. He also suggests the possibility of actually tailoring gifts to particular attendees ... a technique only possible when the preshow planning is exquisite. So, if the exhibitor knows his prospect is a fan of fly-fishing, the presentation of a gift tied to that pastime can be a stunning, memorable happening.
What's The Bottom Line
More than a century ago, legendary retail magnate John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." It could be said just as easily today of promotional products. The question is, what metrics should one use to help figure it out?
"If the promotional giveaway is geared toward a particular product you're selling, and that product has met or beaten expectations, then usually you can feel there's success associated with the promotion," says Joseph. "But we've also done some things with phone cards, where the purchase of a particular product resulted in a certain number of minutes in the card. Based on how many are sold, that's a direct way of telling if the promotion was worth it or not."
Ultimately, though, promotional items are just one marketing element among many, including signage, advertising, PR, voice mail, e-mail, the company Web page, sales competence and product excellence, to name a few. As a result, it may be best to gauge the success of such gifts solely on their one proven attribute: encouraging productive, informative meetings with key attendees.
Marketing consultant Miller sums it up neatly: "The purpose of business is to create and maintain long-term relationships." This, he adds, may be the ultimate value of promotional products at a trade show.
"I want to get face-to-face with a prospect," he says. "If that meeting could be responsible for a huge check in my pocketbook, then the promotional product would have impact. But if your company or product isn't any good, that's your company's or product's fault, not the fault of the
promotion."
Reprinted with permission of Successful Promotions, copyright 2006
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